GOD-centric :

A life centered on the pursuit of a good and fair God of love

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Ch. 5 The Quest (continued)

Faith & Reason

  Issues: Basically some philosophers believed that faith and reason were incompatible and faith was superior to reason; some that faith and reason were incompatible and reason was superior to faith; some that faith and reason lived in separate dimensions of influence; and some that faith and reason were compatible.

  My Take: Faith and reason were compatible as a goal towards which we perpetually strive. I thought that God was a very complicated topic and the more complicated the topic the longer it usually took us to understand it but we should keep on trying because God was the most important topic of all. To those folks who believed that faith and reason were incompatible and faith was superior to reason, I wanted to ask: “Why would God give us reason and then expect us not to use it when it came to the most important aspect of life? What would it say about God to suggest that God wanted blind allegiance? Why did God not just create legions of Labrador retrievers who could fawn over God without thought if that was what God really wanted? What would it say about God if God created a world where constructive talk of God could not take place because everyone would stay enclosed in their guarded camps with their revealed tradition and no rational basis of communication? What would it suggest about God if God were so transcendent that nothing could bridge the gap?” My God was not an egomaniac seeking constant unthinking adoration. Blind love was not real love. I had been loved blindly and I bet you have too. Blind love could stroke the ego for a bit but it was like cotton candy ~ too sweet and insubstantial to satisfy. For me to feel genuinely loved, I needed also to experience myself as being genuinely understood. Yes, my anthropomorphism was showing but I did not believe in a totally separate or transcendent God. I believed in a God who was always superior to me but who also played by the rules that God created. For there to be one playbook for God and a completely different one for God's creation implied a rather sinister and game playing God. How could we really love God in our hearts if we could never understand God at all using our God-given brains?